Usually, she reveled in these sorts of moments. She was a damn good event coordinator. She had a way with details. She always had. And she got an enormous amount of satisfaction from making things orderly.
It’s what had allowed her to keep her family running smoothly when her mother had walked out on them. It was the reason her events ran like clockwork. With a to-do list and a timeline on her clipboard, there was nothing she couldn’t tackle.
So why, then, did tonight ring so hollow?
She glanced at the arrivals list. All the guests were here, including two she hadn’t been expecting, since the night’s biggest donor, Carl Bing the Timber King, had failed to mention them when he’d RSVP’d.
The Timber King wasn’t going to be impressed if she let his daughter and her socialite BFF sit on the floor in the back of the ballroom, which was just the sort of hell where non-RSVPers belonged, by Chelsea’s way of thinking, so she’d sent Shanna off in search of extra chairs and place settings.
That meant Chelsea now had plenty of time to worry about the fact that she still had three MIA hockey players, even though the event was kicking off in—she glanced at her phone—twelve minutes.
Before, when she’d been working toward the directorship, she would have been all over these “challenges,” determined to make sure everything worked out. Tonight, though, she felt a little defeated at the realization that a large part of her career involved her playing the role of glorified babysitter for a bunch of overgrown man-child types, who got obscene amounts of money and deference for playing a dumb game for a living, yet who couldn’t be bothered to show up on time for a charity event supporting the children’s hospital with a bunch of people who’d paid a thousand dollars a plate to dine with them.
Chelsea took a deep, calming breath.
Okay. Maybe her night of passion hadn’t completely exorcised her disappointment at losing the promotion to her brother.
A quick glance around the ballroom confirmed that, as per usual, Andrew was nowhere to be found while she worked her ass off to—
Nope. She was not going there. Chelsea checked the clipboard that was a permanent fixture on her arm at events like this.
“Okay, extra chairs and place settings are on their way,” Shanna reported. “What do you need me to do next?”
Chelsea glanced up from her checklist, breathing a sigh of relief at being able to cross one thing off it.
“Sorry I’m late. There was a slight issue in traffic.”
Make that two things.
The handsome goalie stopped in front of them, and Chelsea smiled. Lincoln Kennedy was definitely the least of her current worries. He was quiet and professional and focused, and one of the few people she knew she didn’t have to stress over tonight. “It’s no problem. I got your texts. Thanks for keeping me in the loop. You’re at table five. Shanna will take you over there and give you the lowdown on the donors you’re sitting with.”
“Sounds good.”
Okay, that just left Jason Decker, of course—the guy was apparently great on the ice but keeping track of him was the bane of her existence—and the new guy. Brett something. She checked her list again. Sillinger. She’d heard through the grapevine he was a bit of a problem child, running into some media trouble after his marriage imploded, and hadn’t quite managed to get himself back on even footing yet. But she did her best to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The chairs arrived then, and Chelsea set about getting them discreetly delivered to table two, relieved to see that her brother had indeed arrived, and that he was making himself useful by keeping the Timber King family entertained with small talk, so they wouldn’t notice the last-minute adjustment to their seating arrangement. Okay. So far so good.
“Hey there, beautiful. You looking for me?”
Thank God. She held back her sigh of relief and fixed Jason Decker with her sternest look. Not that it had ever had any effect before, but what could she say? She was the eternal optimist.
“You know the whole reason I sent a car for you was to make sure you were on time tonight, right? And where’s your date? You RSVP’d that you were bringing a plus one.”
“Yeah, the date didn’t really work out. But I took the car! And since me and Brett go way back, and I knew you’d want him to be on time too, I had the driver swing by his hotel and pick him up. So, you’re welcome.”
Well, at least that took care of that problem. She put a checkmark next to Jason’s name, crossed off his plus one, and slid her pen up the roster so she could mark his buddy present and accounted for, too.
“I’m going to start telling you the wrong start time for these events if you don’t get your act together. But since you brought me the new guy, I’ll forgive you this once. Where is this Brett you…?”
Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of the tall, broad man in the impeccable gray suit who stepped forward at the sound of his name.
Oh. No. Way.
And there he was, the stranger who’d blown her house down, all right. Along with all her inhibitions. Still so big and beautiful, it made her heart stutter. She’d told Shanna he’d caught her eye because he was the only man in the bar not wearing a suit, but it had been a dirty lie. Because tonight he was owning his suit, and he looked mouth-wateringly sexy, and just as virile. And Chelsea knew, without a doubt, that she would have picked him out of any crowd, no matter what he was wearing.
He got his shock under control quicker than she did. She could tell because she was still standing wide-eyed by the time he’d followed the curves of her body from head to toe and all the way back up.
It was an intimate perusal, but luckily for both of them, Jason wasn’t much for catching subtleties.
“Brett Sillinger, reporting for duty.” He stuck his hand out, and as relieved as she was that he was keeping things under wraps, she eyed his proffered arm warily. His suit jacket and cuff rode up a little, and she could see the wisps of black ink that denoted the start of the tattoos that decorated his arm from wrist to shoulder—the ones she’d run her fingers over last night while his body drove into hers. That hand had slid over her skin, pulled her close, given her an orgasm so ground-breaking, her whole world had been shaken.
He lifted a challenging brow, and she forced herself to accept the handshake. As she’d feared, tingles raced up and down her arm, and her libido throbbed to life deep in her gut.
“Chelsea,” she told him. But her voice, and her courage, deserted her before she added her last name.
That easy grin made her want to climb him like a ladder.
One night, she reminded herself. She’d made the rule herself.
“Chelsea,” he repeated, nodding to himself, saying her name as if he was trying it on, and then he said it again, as if he was taking it off. “Well, Chelsea, that’s a great dress.”
She shifted at the phantom sensation of her panties dropping. He licked his lips and she felt it everywhere.
“Red suits you.”
Was it possible to come just from someone alluding to a nickname?
Jason’s guffaw broke the intensity of the moment. “Ha! Save your moves, playboy. She’s—”
“Can you please take Mr. Decker to table fourteen?” Chelsea said as Shanna came up to them. She’d never been so glad to see her friend and assistant greeter.
Jason frowned at the formality, and she just hoped it was enough to distract him from what he’d been about to say. Although, for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why she was so scared for Brett to find out she was the owner’s daughter. She’d had her one night. That was the guiding tenet of her little foray into hedonism. And it wasn’t like she could keep the secret forever.
“C’mon, Chelsea. Don’t be mad. I wasn’t that late.”
“Well, go schmooze it up with the Brinderhoffs like a good little hockey player and I’ll consider forgiving you,” she counselled, glad when Shanna escorted him out of hearing range.
Brett stepped right into her personal
space, so close that the top edge of her clipboard pressed into his chest, and her stupid heart fluttered against her rib cage, as if it was trying to get closer to him.
“You disappeared.” His voice was low, almost a growl, and it rasped against her skin, raising goose bumps down her arms. As a defense mechanism, she angled her body toward the stage at the front of the room.
“I thought that’s how one-night stands worked.” Chelsea inspected her clipboard, even though she didn’t need to. Brett was supposed to sit at her father’s table. He was just here for a show of solidarity tonight, so they could trot him out and hand him a jersey while donors clapped. They’d let him schmooze after dinner, but they weren’t ready to let him be a team ambassador quite yet.
Brett’s chuckle made her nipples tighten instantly, as though they’d learned to sit up and beg at the sound, in some kind of inconveniently Pavlovian sex response.
“For ordinary ones, sure, you can get that done in regulation time. But I was looking forward to some sudden-death OT this morning—see which one of us would score first.” He shifted, bringing his lips close enough that she could feel his breath against the shell of her ear, and she closed her eyes at the delicious sensation of all her hormones migrating in a southerly direction.
“I was gonna let you win, too.”
Jesus.
It was wrong how much she wanted to let him. It had to be.
“What are you doing?”
“Flirting.”
“Well stop it,” she snapped, as reality began to set in. “We can’t do that here.”
“Tell me where we can do it, and I’ll make it happen.”
How could he be so cool about this? Didn’t he know she was barely hanging on here? She had no clue what she was supposed to do, now that her one-night stand had walked into the gala she was throwing, looking so insanely hot that all she wanted to do was chuck her clipboard across the room and pounce on him.
A hockey player. Not a model. Not a biker. He was a freaking hockey player.
“Why are you making this so hard?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
It took a moment for the dumb joke to land, and he tipped his head, flicking his eyebrows up in expectation. “C’mon,” he teased, and just like that, she realized that he’d put her at ease, pulled her back from the edge. “That was funny.”
“That was prepubescent,” she chided, hating the smile that was taking over the corner of her mouth. The panic that had been working its way through her blood ebbed into something mellow and fizzy.
He lifted his chin, and she had the weird impression that she’d somehow made him proud, even though her restrained reaction could be fully attributed to following his lead.
“Well, yeah. Dick jokes always are. Which is what makes them funny. Geez, Chelsea. What kind of party are you running here?”
The casual use of her name caught her by surprise.
The fact that she liked it so much, even more so.
The moment stretched out between them, and her brain tumbled with all sorts of media-appropriate answers to his question, but there was only one she kept coming back to.
It was the kind of party with too many people.
Something low and wicked started to throb in her belly as she stared at him. That awareness they’d shared at the bar was unfurling between them now, and she couldn’t help the dart of her tongue.
His gaze flicked down to watch her wet her lips, and when he lifted his eyes again, her body reacted to the promise in them.
“Brett!”
The greeting broke into the intense moment, and Chelsea bobbled her clipboard.
Brett snatched it out of the air before it could fall to the ground, and she tried to tell herself it was wrong that his quick reflexes and heroic catch made him even more attractive to her.
Jeez. You’d think he’d saved a kitten from a burning building or something.
Still, she accepted the clipboard from him, pulling it close and hugging it to her chest.
“Great to have you here!” Her father’s voice was a little too loud. It was a thing he did sometimes, when he was trying to call attention to a moment. Craig London was the undisputed king of the photo op. As planned, one of the roving photographers heard the commotion and lifted his camera to capture the moment for posterity.
“On behalf of the Wolfpack, hell, on behalf of Montana, we can’t tell you how pleased we are to be adding some size to our defensive line.”
“It’s a pleasure to be here, sir.” Brett played the game with aplomb, accepting her father’s hearty handshake as though they hadn’t met the day before. This greeting was strictly for show, which was obvious to everyone, even before he slapped a hand against Brett’s back and angled them toward one of the lenses pointed their way.
“I’m really looking forward to the rest of the season.”
“But enough shop talk,” her dad said, which was a load of crap. This entire shindig was built on the altar of shop talk. “Tonight is all about having a good time. And, of course, raising money for a very worthy cause. I see you’ve already met my beautiful daughter.”
Her dad’s beefy hand landed on her shoulder as he tugged her close for a one-armed bear hug.
Brett’s head snapped toward her, and he searched her eyes with something like desperation, wordlessly asking her to deny the one thing she couldn’t.
“Chelsea helps run the community fund, so she’s always setting up these fancy events and making us wear our monkey suits, right sweetie?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
The lights dimmed, right when they were supposed to, to signify the start of the evening’s festivities, but she took no pleasure in the clockwork precision of her event.
“Oh, looks like we’re about to get started. C’mon, Brett. Let’s go take our seats.”
Chelsea watched helplessly as her father ushered Brett toward the front of the room.
Chapter Seven
The boss’s daughter.
Fucking cursed.
He’d told her so in the elevator last night.
It wasn’t an overstatement, either. He believed enough to always put his left skate on first and to never leave the ice until he’d taken three slapshots from the right side of the blue line. He’d been respecting the sanctity of the playoff beard since before he could grow a decent one.
What other explanation was there for this night?
He sat through the million speeches that registered as buzzing in his ears as he processed the fact that he hadn’t even made it twenty-four hours before fucking up.
The Wolfpack had only picked up his contract until the end of the season, with an option to renew. And he really needed them to renew. If they didn’t, no team in their right mind would be willing to take a chance on him. His hockey career would be as good as over.
That was why he needed to stay focused, and stop living dangerously by flirting with the most beautiful, incredible, responsive woman he’d ever—
The sound of his name yanked him back to the present.
Then London pulled him up on stage, said the same kind of bullshit he’d said earlier—strong defense, playoff run, go Wolfpack—and people applauded as the man shook his hand and handed him his ceremonial jersey. Brett pulled it on over his suit, smiled big for the cameras, and took it right back off again so he could scrawl his autograph on the crest and they could add it to the silent auction, the proceeds of which were going to a great cause, so people should remember to give generously and enjoy their dinners.
Craig London might have put on his jovial, man-of-the-people act to benefit whoever this fundraiser was for, but the man wasn’t fooling Brett. He knew he was being watched and evaluated. He was expected to play the game off the ice as well as he did on it.
So Brett did what he had to do. Laughed at important people’s jokes, charmed his tablemates, posed for pictures, all the while hiding the fact that he was following a certain red-dressed
stunner around the ballroom with his eyes.
Locating her was surprisingly easy. She had a tendency to stick to the edges of the room—she probably thought that meant she was being unobtrusive. In reality, she’d stick out no matter where she was. It fascinated him that she looked far more comfortable here, in a gown presiding over a ballroom full of people, than she had in jeans and a sweater, hanging out with him in a hotel lounge. She was a study in contradictions. And she intrigued the hell out of him.
He smiled his most charming smile at the woman on his left, who’d been recounting her grandson’s last hockey game in excruciating detail for the last twenty minutes. “Sounds like I’d better retire before Tommy hits the NHL. Will you excuse me for a moment, Lydia?”
As expected, using her name earned him an approving smile and a free pass out of the conversation. Brett headed straight for the guy in the black satin vest slinging drinks at the nearest bar station. “Whiskey neat.”
He shoved a twenty in the tip glass and rested his elbow on the glossy black counter, drumming his fingers as he scanned the edges of the crowd. He found his target immediately, and his body stirred in response.
Chelsea.
Chelsea London, his brain reminded his dick, though it didn’t seem nearly as concerned about that as it should. He accepted the well-timed drink, knocking back a healthy swallow as he watched her laugh with a woman wearing enough diamonds to fund tonight’s cause three times over.
The best thing to do would be to forget her. Leave their perfect night in the past where it belonged.
Hockey needed to be his number one priority right now.
His future depended on it.
And she was working.
The woman patted Chelsea’s arm before she raised a gloved hand to catch someone else’s attention, leaving Chelsea standing there.
Alone.
Goddamnit.
Brett downed the rest of his drink, left the glass on the bar, and walked straight toward her.
Panic flitted across her face, and her eyes darted side to side, looking for an exit.
He knew the feeling.
Taking a Shot (Montana Wolfpack) Page 5
